What Evil Means to Us
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19904886 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C F Alford (0000-0002-9948-2454, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1997 |
| Pages | 200 |
| Publication date | 1997-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | What Evil Means to Us (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7591/9781501720512 |
| OpenAlex | W626124104 |
| Open Library | OL33737184M |
| ISBN | 9781501720512 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 24 |
C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil-in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire."Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination-in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative-offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Existentialism · Feeling · Good and evil · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Vampire · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Unpacking the Mind of Evil
The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty
Morality and a Sense of Self
A Psychoanalytic Study of Evil
Dystopia and the limits of sociological thought
Psychological Boundaries and Ethnic Conflict
The genealogy of violence
North Korean Christian refugee understanding of evil
Introduction
Planning and the problem of evil
Evil Be Thou My Good
The Immorality of Terrorism and the Ethical Core of the Envy That Spurs it
Introduction
Accountability and the Evil of Administrative Ethics
Ordinary Men
The Roots of Violence
Probing the Minds of Nazi Perpetrators
Cracking the Code of Genocide
Expressions and Projections of Evil in Mass Violence
Psychosocial Perspectives of Girls and Violence
Human Rights, Suffering and Frailty
Gangs and guilt
The Limits of Forgiveness and the Ends of Politics
Psychopathy and the Face of Control in Supermax
| Unique citing works | 24 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,89 |
| Citation span | 1999 - 2026 (28) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 20 |